ZEPHYRHILLS - Jim Aiman said it sounded like an artillery shell had exploded in his front yard Tuesday morning.
But when he scrambled to the front door, what he saw was even worse: a school bus lying on its side, full of screaming children.
Two thoughts raced through his mind, he said. The safety of his wife and kids who should have been standing where the bus landed.
And the possibility of a fire.
Seeing his family uninjured in a different corner of the yard, Aiman sprinted toward the school bus, which was rapidly leaking diesel fuel.
Within minutes, scores of panicked parents, fire rescue workers and school officials were mobilized, too.
Thanks to cell phones, terror spread quickly through this rural corner of eastern Pasco County.
In the end, a Michigan driver of a pickup would be dead and her son, a passenger, critically injured. Thirty-two children would be banged and bruised, but none seriously hurt.
But in those first frantic moments, a community held its breath.
"I wanted to give them all a hug'
Aiman, 38, a machinist who works out of his Chancey Road home, tore open the hatches on the roof of bus 511.
He climbed inside. Children and book bags lay in a jumble. The students, in kindergarten through fifth grade at Chester Taylor Elementary School, cried out for their mothers.
"That's when I started getting upset," recalled Aiman. "I wanted to give them all a hug, but I couldn't."
Instead, he began passing their little bodies to passers-by through the hatch as the air grew heavier with the smell of diesel.
"I was worried about a flash fire," he said.
His neighbor, 85-year-old Edelmiro Tirado, feared the same. He helped five or six children out of the back door of the bus before the scene overwhelmed him.
"I was a nervous wreck," a teary-eyed Tirado said later. "The man behind me said, "Let me take over.' "
Michael Lewis, 38, grabbed the children and helped them out the back bus door to the pavement. He was on his way home from the store when he pulled off the road to see what was causing the tie-up. That's when he saw overturned bus. He abandoned his car and ran to the scene.
"I got six kids, you know," he said later, though none was on the bus. "I'm shaken up about it."
With everyone out of the bus, Aiman and his wife, 33-year-old Elizabeth Petersen, steered the children into their one-story red-brick house.
Aiman passed out sodas and four of his cell phones. The children dialed their parents.
And a new wave of panic began.
First reactions
Della Apple was at home caring for her 1-year-old when the phone rang. School bus. Accident. Her daughter.
Apple heard the words, phoned her mother, turned over the baby and sprinted to the car.
Apple punched the gas pedal as she sped from nearby Court Street to the accident scene.
"Dear God," prayed the Baptist mother, "wrap angels around all those babies."
Apple left her car on Allen Road and rushed to the house. Inside, her daughter, 7-year-old Jennifer Sutton had a black eye, but otherwise was okay. She had been sitting on the side of the bus that hit the ground.
As Apple spoke outside the house, amid medical helicopters landing and taking off, fire trucks and ambulances lining the road, a shaking Donna Smythe walked up.
"Who's your child?" Apple asked. "Who's your child?"
Smythe could barely speak. Her face was white, her eyes swollen.
"Michelle Smythe," she said, her body and lips trembling.
"I can go over there?" Smythe asked Apple.
"Yes, they are in the house," Apple said trying to calm her.
"I can go in there?" Smythe asked.
"Yes," Apple said. As Smythe hurried away, Apple shook her head.
"This is the worst thing that ever happened to me in my entire life," Apple said.
"It's like your biggest fear comes true'
Aiman's house became command central. Parents worked cell phones, lining up care for other children. School officials and Pasco County rescue crews checked students before placing some on stretchers and sending others home with their parents.
"Heather, I'm going to ride with you in the ambulance," one mother said. Pink and purple book bags hung off the shoulders of some students who limped alongside adults. Some nursed black eyes or scratches on their arms and legs.
"Hey, Christina, what happened to you?" called a girl with cuts around her chin.
Christina, a slight young blond girl, stuck out one of her legs to reveal several gashes.
Even an hour after the accident, the panic was palpable.
One mom in a white jacket ran through the chain-link fence surrounding Aiman's 1-acre lot. She spotted her son crouched next to an official who was scribbling information. She dropped to her knees, threw her arms around him and buried her pale face in his neck.
Kimberly Toma had dropped off her daughter at the bus stop just 10 minutes before her phone rang.
It was 8-year-old Kasey, screaming.
Toma left the house without locking the door.
"I didn't know what to expect" at the scene, Toma said. "It's like your biggest fear comes true."
But Toma arrived to find her daughter without so much as a scratch.
Kasey, a second-grader, had been sitting about halfway back on the bus, with her best friend, Robert "Bobby" Arnold, across the aisle.
"We felt it when we were up in the air," said Robert, 10, who is in third grade.
The bus had tipped over, and the boy landed on top of his backpack. Kasey tumbled on top of him.
Robert said he knew right away he wasn't hurt. He started looking for an escape. He found one.
"Me and my friends punched the windows out so everybody could get out," he said.
Two hours later at East Pasco Medical Center, the two fidgeted in chairs outside the emergency room. They waited with their mothers for their neighbor, Christopher Mason, who was still being checked out.
Soon, their friend emerged with his mother, showing off pictures of his skeleton. Wearing an oversized hospital gown with a penguin and whale print, he grinned and munched a 3 Musketeers bar.
"He's so tickled with those X-rays," said Christopher's grandmother, Agnes Mason.
The families left together, relieved and exhausted, just before noon.
Said Robert's mom, Sally Dersch: "I'm just going to stay with him all day and watch him like a paranoid mother."
A hospital at the ready
East Pasco Medical Center was in "Code Yellow."
Extra nurses and doctors reported for work, and two chaplains were there for counseling, said Jerry Sterner, spokesman for the Zephyrhills hospital that is 5 miles from crash site.
"We beef the ER staff, but we're also here to give support . . . in comforting the parents and giving them information," he said.
It's a scenario the hospital drills for twice a year, but the real thing is rare.
In all, 10 children ages 6 through 11 were treated at East Pasco on Tuesday, all with minor injuries. The worst case was a broken wrist, Sterner said.
A total of 13 children were taken by ambulance or helicopter to area hospitals. None suffered serious injuries, according to school and Florida Highway Patrol officials.
Witnesses recount crash
Witnesses said the bus driver had no time to react.
Minutes after the bus made a pickup at Chancey Road and Pollack Lane at 9:10 a.m., a Chevrolet pickup traveling south on Allen Road slammed into its side.
The bus, heading west on Chancey, spun counterclockwise and landed on its passenger side. It had been just two or three stops from the school.
The truck driver was 45-year-old Carol Fields of Flint, Mich., according to the Florida Highway Patrol. Her 16-year-old son, James, was in critical condition Tuesday night at St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa. A woman in Michigan who identified herself as Fields' daughter on the telephone declined to talk to reporters.
Fields never stopped for the stop sign, said 73-year-old Grover Knight of Zephyrhills, who was driving behind the school bus when the truck hit.
"If he was running a mile, he was running 70-80 mph," Knight said as wind from a helicopter knocked his black cowboy hat off.
Neighbors said they have complained about the intersection to the county for years. Motorists often blow through the stop sign on Allen Road and ignore the 30 mph speed limit
"The bus looked terrible'
Rhonda Slepinski was at home Tuesday morning when she got a call on her cell phone from a woman who lived in front of the crash scene.
Her son, second grader Billy (William Jr.) Slepinski, 7, had been on that bus.
"No parent wants to get that call. So it was very scary," she said.
She couldn't drive to the scene because of the confusion, so she ran for about three minutes to reach her son. Then she saw the bus.
"The bus brought me to my knees," she said. "The bus looked terrible."
Billy was flown to St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa, officials said. He had been taken from the scene with head trauma and shaky vital signs, his mother said, but everything apparently checked out fine. He was scheduled to be released Tuesday afternoon.
His mother, at the hospital accompanied by her other son, 19-year old Shane Turner, said Billy had a pretty big bump on the back of his head.
"He was scared. He was pretty shaken up."
She said her son told her he heard a loud crash, and the bus began to tip. His friend fell on top of him, and he said he hit his head five times, though his mother wasn't sure that was correct.
"He said (the crash) was like slow motion," she said.
He doesn't remember how long it took, but "a big man" came and pulled him out.
"He's not afraid," she said. "He was really brave."
Even in shock, Slepinski said, her son was thinking about his bus driver.
"He wants to make sure the bus driver was going to be back."
Shared concern
Still shaken, wrapped in a blanket, and sore all over, "Mr. Jason" was in big demand Tuesday morning.
Despite his injuries - mostly a stiff back and a collection of bruises - bus driver Jason Barrentine wanted more than anything to know his students were safe. And the children wanted to know how he was, even before he was released from the emergency room at Pasco Regional Medical Center.
The 23-year-old, who likes to serenade his young passengers with country songs, has been on the job a little more than a year. He said some details of the crash still were hazy. He remembered helping children out of the bus.
"It was all instinct," he said.
But others called him a hero.
Knight, the man driving behind the bus when it was hit, said Barrentine disregarded his own injuries until the children were safe.
"He didn't leave until all of his children were out," Knight said.
Aiman called Barrentine "an ace."
Barrentine's mother, Cindy, raced to the crash scene when her sister-in-law called.
She found her son on Aiman's front steps, barefoot and dazed.
"He was in shock, you could tell," Mrs. Barrentine said. "I said, "Where are your socks?' He didn't know. We found his socks, and we put them on. And we found one shoe. We couldn't find the other."
His sister and a friend found the brown loafer Tuesday afternoon, wedged under the bus' brake pedal.
At Pasco Regional Medical Center in Dade City, where an ambulance brought Barrentine, his mother waited outside with her husband, Randy, and a crowd of relatives and friends. Cell phones rang, more friends checked in. Mrs. Barrentine got a message to call her sister in Georgia.
Mrs. Barrentine knew her son was going to recover, but she worried just the same.
Her mother, Shirley Coon, had talked with Barrentine for a few moments before doctors needed his attention, and she assured her daughter he was okay.
"He kept asking, "How are the children?"' Coon said. "That's all he wanted to know about, his children."
Even before he was medically cleared to go home, children brought to the hospital for their own bumps and scrapes lined up in front of the heavy oak door to the treatment center. Inside, Barrentine stood slowly from his hospital bed as the children were ushered inside. He reached out to give them a one-armed hug, while protecting the sore left side of his body.
"How you doing, buddy?" Barrentine said, reaching out to 8-year-old Jimmy Valez and rubbing his hair. "I'll bet you'd rather be back in school."
- Staff writers Rob Brannon and Rebecca Catalanello contributed to this report.
